Northern Kentucky University is among the fastest growing universities in Kentucky. It hosts over 15,000 students with about 13,000 undergraduate and 2,000 graduate students. The goal of the wireless program at NKU is to provide secure, robust and ubiquitous wireless access throughout the campus, both indoors and outdoors. This ensures that students always stay connected and feel at home. The classrooms are equipped with smart technology to ensure that the teachers can benefit from technology when collaborating with students. The IT team has blanketed the libraries, the classrooms, the dorm-rooms as well as the outdoor areas with Wi-Fi. In the previous blog in 2012, we described how the Cisco 7.5 release allows networks to recover with no client re-authentication in the rare event of your primarily wireless LAN controller goes down.

Number of students: 15,000 of which about 2000 stay in residence halls

Number of teachers/staff: 2000

# WLAN clients: Approximately 8500 concurrent clients

Access-Point Model and Units: 1200 units of AP models including AP702W, 3502, 3602, 3702, 1550 and a few older Access Points which are being phased out

Controller Model and Units: 2 Pairs of WiSM2 operating in 7.6.120.0

Switch Models: Various models 2960, 3650, 3850, 3750X and 6500

Prime Infrastructure: 1.4.2

Mobility Services Engine: 7.6

Deployment Details: We talked to Christopher Johnson, the Senior Infrastructure Systems Analyst II at Northern Kentucky University to capture some of his thoughts around their choice of this solution and the associated benefits. Read More »

Wireless is enabling change everywhere. According to Cisco’s VNI Global Forecast, wireless traffic will bypass wired traffic 40% by the year 2017. This is evident by the way many organizations are using Wi-Fi technology. Take healthcare providers as an example: many hospitals today rely on Wi-Fi to provide seamless clinician roaming, improved efficiency and patient care–not to mention patients’ relatives and friends who expect to connect to guest Wi-Fi. And then there is education where we are seeing both universities and K-12 schools faced with more and more students coming onto campus carrying mobile devices with bandwidth intensive applications like video.

The explosion of high performance applications and the number of clients using them is a big reason why 802.11ac adoption is happening at a rapid pace. 802.11ac as a standard addresses the performance needs of applications while providing a robust network that handles a growing number of client devices. Cisco provides our customers with a unique solution to meet the high density requirements with a technology suite called Cisco High Density Experience (HDX). HDX helps Cisco customers prepare beyond 802.11ac and addresses the key aspects of any network that is challenged by the high density of large numbers of clients on the network and increasing performance demands of bandwidth intensive applications. Deploying 802.11ac with Cisco’s HDX Technology will provide a relief from the bandwidth demands while also making the overall Wi-Fi network more efficient.

With this in mind, we are hosting a webinar on June 26th where we focus on 802.11ac Standard, Cisco’s 802.11ac solution including our HDX Technology and how it can be used in various networks. We have also invite Joe Christoffersen who is the Director of IT at Katy Independent School District in Katy, TX to provide his unique perspective on how Katy ISD is deploying 802.11ac, how it will affect the performance of his network and the benefits he expects from this technology.

Let’s take a closer look at location analytics generated at Cisco Live! If you haven’t seen CMX Analytics before, let me tell you: it’s powerful. There are three pieces of CMX Analytics: Dashboard, Analytics and Reports, all generated by the location data from the MSE. Here are a few key views from the show floor:

1. Dashboard: The CMX Dashboard features a number of customizable widgetsthat visualize location data such as dwell time and device count by zone or by time.

Hourly Visitors for South Halls on Tuesday May 20

Tuesday marked a steady flow through the day with the World of Solutions and breakout sessions all day. You see that spike at 5pm? That’s when the beverages and refreshments came out—and then you see people tapering off round 7pm to head out for dinner.

A lot can change in 25 years. At the first Cisco Live (then known as Networkers conferences) in 1989, 200 geeks gathered for the inaugural event. Fast forward to three weeks ago, when we welcomed a whopping 25,000 attendees into the arms of our namesake, beautiful San Francisco.

We heard there was some interest in how the network performed at the show, so I wanted to share some of the interesting statistics about the network at Cisco Live! I shudder at the thought of the ancient network from 25 years ago. So here we go:

Wi-Fi Client Devices

This year we saw 30,705 unique devices, with 7000 in the theater for John Chambers’ keynote.

# of Unique Clients

# of Sessions

# of Unique Users

# of Unique APs

Avg Users per AP

30705

1396239

30705

859

33.64

Max. Concurrent Connected Wi-Fi Devices

There was a peak of 14216 concurrently connected device at SF this year.

Technische Universität Darmstadt, usually known as TU Darmstadt is a research university based in Germany. It was founded in 1877 and over the last 137 years has grown to be among the largest and most prestigious public universities in Germany serving over 25,000 students per year. It is the alma-mater to many world-wide leaders from Nobel prize winners, a CEO of a fortune 500 company, a president of a country and multiple World Robocup champions.

No wonder, they have a reference from Albert Einstein!

In 2009 TU Darmstadt embraced BYOD with the 5508 Series Controller managing the 1140 802.11n Access Points. Recently we talked to Thomas Vogel, the Head of Network Group and Andreas Liebe, the Network Services Manager who have over 15 years of experience managing WLAN environments. In this blog, we will describe some of the details of WLAN deployments using the 3850 Series Switch and the 5760 Series Wireless LAN Controller to address the new requirements in the school environment. Read More »

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